better living through linen
I have been sleeping like a rock the past couple weeks. I’m not sure why – the time change probably had something to do with it, and I guess the added physical work of having the kid around for March break led to some extra exercise to wear out the ol’ anatomy and encourage unconsciousness once my sixteen hours were put into the time clock each day. This comes at the expense of my poor wife, who has had to rouse herself at least ninety percent of the time to deal with the various distresses and misalignments that are so common in the other bedrooms of the house overnight. It’s not on purpose! I’m just out, gone, surprised as anybody to find that it’s suddenly 7AM again.
Perhaps I’m able to achieve a better restful state because of all the stuff we’ve bought recently. There has been a serious gadget and electronics overhaul around here. Want to hear about it?
- Working from home means that you should have work-quality stuff to work with, right? First things first – client files, safely kept. Enter the D-Link DNS-323, with two terabytes of storage for all of the websites, documents, photos, and other stuff that I’d be out of business for if I didn’t keep secure. Setup was a breeze – buy two hard drives, put ‘em in, plug in the wires, turn it on – and the box itself is much quieter than the dedicated server I’d had running 24×7 for this purpose. Thumbs up, with two caveats – it’s an OK UPnP server, but it serves MP3s while ignoring numbering in ID3 tags, which means that you get to listen to your stuff in alphabetical order instead of album order. And video streaming is fussy, too, with good codec support but not if the path to the file contains non-standard characters. PLEASE LET THERE BE FIRMWARE TO TAKE CARE OF THIS.
- Likewise, the individual who purports to be a sometime graphic designer can’t be seen with a square monitor – get with the times, right? The Samsung 2494SW is pretty damn good, especially for only a shade over two hundred bucks. Plus, I get to run a sidebar now! I like having my calendar right there, you know? Yeah.
- When we bought this house three years ago, we inherited its washing machine and dryer, because who wants to haul that shit when they move? No one. Predictably, these machines were less than awesome, and so we put them on notice: shape up or ship out. Which explains why this set are now calling our basement home (with pedestals, natch). Plus: the price has gone up since we purchased, so it was an investment, right? We’re making money!
- Pro tip: when the customer is sort of indicating that they want to purchase multiple items at Future Shop, the sales dudes are only too ready to drop their pants to make the deal. So why not throw in this dishwasher and get free delivery and a couple hundred bucks off the final bill? (I have no idea why it gets such poor reviews on their site – we put a ton of dishes into the thing and it all comes out beautifully.) Our old dishwasher, too, was dragged away by the guys delivering the washer and dryer. Off to their final end, I guess. Nice knowing you!
- And on the telecommunications front, I have finally upgraded from my shitty, shitty Touch phone with Windows Mobile to something that feels like it was made this century, the Nexus One, aka the Google phone. Kind of an impulse purchase, as I knew I wanted something Android and had originally planned on getting the Milestone, but TELUS offered me a very, very poor retention offer to get me to sign a new term, so I told them to stuff it. Unlocked, which means that once my current contract is up, I’ll be able to use the full force of my power of persuasion to bring TELUS around to my way of thinking. Anyway, it’s a great phone, lots of neat features, though the overall feel is certainly not as polished as the iPhone, and it’s a bit buggy if I don’t reboot it once in a while. But the Android platform itself is very strong and it feels good not to have the clone phone. Plus – GPS that actually works! I’m all over Foursquare, I tell you what.
That may be enough stimulus to the local economy for now, though I suppose you never know – didn’t get that new laptop I wanted, and probably should have…